How war has helped create an Imperial Presidency

Not many people would think that the character of Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush or the conflicts these two men presided over during their time as President have very much in common. The moral leadership of these two men could not be more different, with FDR seen as a national hero, guiding the country to a military, moral, and leadership triumph, while Bush is seen in the reverse on all counts. However a close examination of these two presidencies reveal how the political and economic pressures of war have undermined the republican framework of checks and balances affirmed in the U.S. Constitution by concentrating more power in the executive branch of American government and contributing to the rise of an Imperial Presidency.

The framers of the Constitution were well aware of history and were determined not to repeat the tragedy of Rome, a republic that had fallen through military expansion and an army of professional soldiers following the political ambitions of their leader Julius Cesar. The framers of the Constitution were so wary of war and a powerful executive, that they designed the Constitution to give the power to declare war and raise an Army, to the more representative and populous legislative branch. The framers of the Constitution and in particular, James Madison, wrote that the history of all governments demonstrate that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it.

It is in this historical context where the similarities of FDR and George W. Bush become more evident. Although FDR and George W. Bush presided over vastly different wars in the terms of their scale, purpose, and intent, a critical assessment of these two conflicts reveal how similar tactics may have been used by the executive branch to get America involved in a conflict. Balanced between the two extremes of conspiracy theorists and empirical evidence, a recently declassified document known as the McCollum Memo, written a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, sheds some light into the secretive decision making process of the national security state apparatus and the danger that comes with concentrating too much power in the executive branch of the government.

Written by Arthur McCollum, a Japanese-American naval attaché officer who was born in Nagasaki Japan to Baptist missionary parents, this document offered an eight point plan to military leaders and members of Roosevelt’s foreign policy inner circle on how America could provoke Japanese aggression in order to gain public opinion to join the war.

Although President Roosevelt was anxious to get America involved in the war, a majority of Americans opposed the United States entering the war. One of the most influential and powerful political groups of the late 1930s was the America First Committee, a pressure group that embodied the spirit of isolationalism into a national movement. Symbolizing the majority opinion of remaining out of the war in Europe, a Gallop Poll in 1939 taken within days of Hitler’s invasion of Poland found that 90 percent of American’s did not want to get involved in the war. In 1940, this figure would only drop to 88 percent.

It is in this historical context that makes the McCollum memo so important. It is what many conspiracy theorists claim to be the smoking gun of evidence behind the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 and how neoconservative members in America were able to implement recommendations they made in the 1990s of projecting American power to enforce a worldwide “Pax Americana”. Many conspiracy theorists believe the McCollum Memo written in 1940 and only declassified in 1994 was known to people within the inner state of government with access to classified documents like the McCollum Memo.

The greatest source of consensus among conspiracy theorists is the connection between the McCollum Memo, the subsequent attack on Pearl Harbor, and the insertion of using the example of “another Pearl Harbor” in a document called Rebuilding America’s Defenses. This provocative policy proposal was written by two leading neoconservatives, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, a year before the September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States.

Further fueling conspiracy theories of a government or inner state involvement in the September 11th terrorist attacks, is the fact that statements from the Rebuilding America’s Defenses article, were later included almost word for word into the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, more commonly known as the Bush Doctrine.

While some Americans outside of Washington DC may be aware of the link between the 2000 publication Rebuilding America’s Defenses and the subsequent 2002 Bush Doctrine, few Americans recognize how a small amount of unelected people who belong to influential think tanks can wield so much power within the executive branch of American government.
While few Americans know of the link between the terrorist attacks of 2001 and “another Pearl Harbor” neoconservative architects of the Iraq War they were looking for to get political support for the militaristic agenda, even fewer Americans are familiar with executive branch decision by Harry Truman to drop the two atomic bombs on civilian population centers in Japan.

Beginning with historian Robert Stinnett, who started the controversy of suggesting the Roosevelt administration may have sacrificed 3,000 American lives at Pearl Harbor in order for America to enter the war, some historians are now questioning the true motives behind Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons on Japan. New research is indicating that the use of the atomic bombs used on Japan was done more as a preemptive show of force against Russia, rather than the popular belief that the bombs were used to save over one million American lives and to speed up the end of the war.

Citing a June 15, 1945 memo by the Joint War Plans Committee, which assumed a worse-case scenario of 20,000 to 46,000American deaths in an invasion of the Japanese islands, various military leaders and even some scientists who created the bomb such as Albert Einstein, thought the decision to use the atomic weapons was deplorable and was used more as a preemptive show of force against Russia. Having access to the same classified June 15, 1945 memo, many military leaders at the time, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, had “grave misgivings” about the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, and that “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary”. Several other military leaders such as Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, General Douglas MacArthur, and U.S. Fleet Commander Admiral Ernest King all voiced concern with Truman’s decision to use the atomic weapons on a defeated military.

Though many historians agree the decision to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan was to demonstrate America’s new power to potential adversaries like the Soviet Union, there is also growing evidence that the decision to drop the bombs on Japan was also attributed to an inexperienced leader with limited foreign relations experience and the even more darker suspicion of justifying the two billion dollar cost of the Manhattan Project.

Supporting this viewpoint is the revelation by historian Baron Bernstein that Harvard University President and Truman advisor James Conant engineered the drafting and release of the February 1947 Harpers Magazine article, “The decision to use the atomic bomb” by former Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stimson. This article helped shape the public’s understanding of why the nuclear weapons were used on civilian targets and established the widely accepted notion that the bombs saved one million American lives. This close relationship between Harry Truman and James Conant indicates an executive concerned about his legacy and an individual using the press to influence and distort public opinion.

To be fair to Truman and to demonstrate the danger of a too powerful executive branch, when Truman took office in April 1944, he had no idea of the existence of the Manhattan Project. During the Manhattan Project, it was considered that the Vice President did not need to know about the existence of the research being conducted to develop an atomic weapon. Due to the fact that history will never know what FDR’s decision would have been in regards to using the weapon, the secret development of the bomb forever changed the dynamic between America and the world, as well as the relationship between the executive and the other branches of American government.

It is in this perspective that history will not look too harshly on George W. Bush. Most future historians will see his unilateralist use of force in 2003 as a result of the actions first set in motion by FDR in the mid 1930s, which set the precedent for executive overreach and militaristic aggression in the decades that followed the end of World War II.